Generally Available: Track AKS supported Kubernetes version regional updates in AKS release tracker

Generally Available: Track AKS supported Kubernetes version regional updates in AKS release tracker
AKS supported Kubernetes version release updates are available in AKS release tracker. Users can check current in-support Kubernetes versions and LTS versions for a specific region and track new patches version release progress with release tracker.

Generally Available: New Availability Zone Features for Azure App Service
Enhanced Availability Zone support for Azure App Service is now generally available. This update simplifies the pre-requisites to enable zone resilience, reduces the cost of running in high availability, and enhances reliability and resilience for your apps.

Key Updates

• Reduced minimum instance requirement for enabling Availability Zones from three to two, while still maintaining a 99.99% SLA.
• Some App Service plans with two or more instances may be able to automatically support Availability Zones without additional setup.
• The zone redundant setting for App Service plans and App Service Environment v3 is now mutable throughout the life of the resources.
• Enhanced dashboard for visibility into Availability Zone information, including physical zone placement and zone counts.
• Eliminates minimum instance fee for App Service Environment v3.

Generally Available: Entity Tags (eTags) for Concurrency Control in AKS
Cluster operators and platform teams managing shared Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) environments often face challenges with conflicting update requests—especially when multiple users or systems interact with the same resource simultaneously. This can result in unintended overwrites or inconsistent states.
The Entity Tags (eTags) feature in AKS, now generally available, provides a built-in mechanism to detect and prevent conflicting operations. AKS now performs concurrency checks during update requests, comparing the provided eTag with the latest stored version. If there’s a mismatch, the request is automatically rejected—ensuring that only the most recent and valid changes are applied to your cluster. This improves reliability and safeguards your configurations during concurrent operations.

Generally Available: Automated deployments in AKS now supports Azure DevOps (ADO), AKS-ready templates and service connectors
Automated deployments in AKS now supports the following features:

• Azure DevOps support: You can now easily generate Azure DevOps (ADO) pipelines to deploy your applications to Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). Automated deployments also helps you containerize your apps by generating Dockerfiles and Kubernetes manifests—streamlining your path to cloud-native development.
• AKS-ready templates: You can now generate production-ready Kubernetes manifests out of the box — including deployment, service, ingress, configmap, and more. These new templates are built to help you deploy cloud-native applications faster and more securely by following Kubernetes and AKS best practices. They include:
• Built-in Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA) configs
• Secure securityContext settings for container hardening
• Fully templated readiness, liveness, and startup probes
• Optional Ingress with managed TLS certificates via app routing
• Service connector support: You can now use service connectors to connect your applications to popular Azure services such as Azure SQL Database, PostgreSQL, Cosmos DB, and more. This allows you to easily:
• Provision secure bindings to Azure services
• Automatically inject credentials into your application via Kubernetes secret objects — no manual setup needed

Generally Available: HTTP proxy can now be enabled on an existing AKS cluster
HTTP Proxy can now be enabled on an existing cluster by updating the cluster to add an HTTP Proxy configuration. AKS will automatically reimage all node pools in the cluster when you update the proxy configuration on your cluster using the az aks update command. You can use Pod Disruption Budgets (PDBs) to safeguard disruption to critical pods during reimage.

Generally Available: Custom certificate authority support in AKS

• CAs allow you to establish trust between your Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) cluster and your workloads as private registries, proxies, and firewalls. A Kubernetes secret is used to store the certificate authority's information until it is passed to all nodes in the cluster.